9/11 Report Missed Key Facts; 'Huge Deal,' Lawmaker Says -- GOPUSA

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9/11 Report Missed Key Facts; 'Huge Deal,' Lawmaker Says
By Susan Jones
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
August 12, 2005

(CNSNews.com) -- Members of the 9/11 commission apparently left some key information out of their "comprehensive" report on the terror attacks - because their own staffers didn't tell them about it.

Press reports said commission staffers are now planning to retrieve their notes from the National Archives to find out if they overlooked important information. (They did, one U.S. senator says.)

The staffers are looking for information about a secret U.S. military unit called Able Danger. That military unit learned -- one year before the 9/11 attacks -- that a terror cell including Mohammed Atta and three other future 9/11 hijackers was operating in the United States.

Information about the terror cell was not handed over to the FBI, although Able Danger repeatedly requested that the FBI be told. Sen. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) says Pentagon lawyers in the Clinton administration refused to tell the FBI, because the four terrorists were in the country legally.

Because the Clinton administration barred U.S. intelligence agencies from sharing information with the FBI, Pentagon lawyers reportedly argued that information on the legal residents could not be shared with the FBI.

Thursday's New York Times reported that 9/11 commission staffers were told that Able Danger had identified a terror cell in the country - a full ten days before the 9/11 commission issued its final report on the terror attacks.

Sen. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) told Fox News on Wednesday that commission staffers were briefed at least once on Able Danger, but he does not believe that panel members were told about it.

"Why weren't they briefed? Was there some deliberate attempt at the staff level of the 9/11 commission to steer the commissioners away from Able Danger because of where it might lead?" Weldon said on Fox News Wednesday.

Weldon also told Fox that some commission staffers did not return phone calls from members of the Able Danger military unit.

Thursday's New York Times reported that Weldon has just sent a letter to commission members, in which he "criticized the panel in scathing terms, saying that its 'refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose.'"

'Hats off to Weldon'

Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told Fox & Friends on Thursday that "Able Danger and what they learned" is a "huge deal."

"We will learn that we should have known about [the Sept. 11 attacks] and that we could have prevented it," he said.

"And hats off to Curt Weldon," Shays said, for directing the media's attention to critical information that other government agencies and the 9/11 commission apparently had no interest in pursuing. (Weldon, in a show-and-tell on the Senate floor in June 2005, explained that Able Danger had identified the four suspected terrorists in 1999.)

Said Shays, "Bottom line is -- we had a defense organization that knew about this [terror] cell... they knew about these guys; they knew about four of the 19 hijackers."

Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 commission's co-chair, told Fox News on Wednesday, "The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it, obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

In another development, a group of Sept. 11 widows that demanded a probe of the events leading up to 9/11 issued a statement saying it is disappointed to learn that the commission's final report is "incomplete and illusory."